Two-Way Mirror Fiona Sampson (best romance ebooks .txt) 📖

to afford new riding habits, like the one she buys Henrietta, but actual mounts must be borrowed and relinquished when friends move away. ‘Poor dearest Bella’ seems to have gone on a wild expedition; she receives a ‘scolding after the perils!—& […] the real thorough fatigue of half running nearly eight miles!’ But Bro’s love affair appears to be the real thing. Last July he was frankly mooning; Henrietta reported that he spent his time ‘between drawing, fishing & smoking […] His hair remains as long and lanky as ever—there is no hope for it now, since [Monti] [Miss] Garden expressed her approbation of it—she is very anxious to return to Torquay, but not more so I suspect than Bro is to see her.’ By June 1840 the moment seems to be passing. Elizabeth notes that her brother has stopped keeping his blind drawn, ‘& indeed ventures to show his whole face out of doors by twilight instead of waiting for the very pitch dark’. For all the sisters’ teasing, though, Elizabeth will later imply that this love affair was so serious that she had wanted to settle money on her favourite brother so he could marry.

But all such hopes and intrigues are in vain, for the following month Bro goes sailing with friends of a Saturday, and never returns. ‘Boating’ is a Barrett family pleasure, one at which Bro is an old hand, and the weather on 11 July is fine. He goes out, as he has before, with ‘two of his friends Mr Vanneck & Captn Clarke’, both also experienced sailors, on Vanneck’s well-equipped vessel the La Belle Sauvage, where they’re aided by a professional crewman. All three ‘gentlemen’ can swim, and nothing is amiss with the weather. So what happens next is a shocking mystery. As Papa writes to Wimpole Street:

They left at a little of the 12 o’clock it seems, & up to this time 11 o’clock Monday Night, they have not been heard of, further than that on Saturday afternoon about 1/2 after 3 o’clock, a Gentleman in his Catch, about 4 miles to the East of Teingmouth [sic], saw a Boat exactly corresponding to the one they went in […] about a mile from him, when he observed it go down; He set sail immediately to the spot, which he says he reached in 4 or 5 minutes, but nothing whatever could he see belo[n]ging to her or the Party in her […] altho he remained about the place for nearly four hours—& what is extraordinary it does not appear that she upset, for he saw the point of her mast above the water last so that I cannot understand, how some one did not keep upon the surface.

The weekend drags on without either reassurance or confirmation of their worst fears. ‘Henrietta, I think, scarcely can believe it, but weeps, Arabel does, & weeps, but her faith bears her up well’ while:

On Sunday afternoon, Mrs Vanneck & two others went over to Teingmouth [sic] & there they heard that a Boat containing two Ladies & I think two Men or Boys […] had been lost off Dawlish now it is supposed that two of dear Bro’s party may have taken their Coats off, & hence from their shirt sleaves supposing they were taken for women. Up to the arrival of the Mail we caught as a straw at the possibility of their having gone to the Land Ship near Lyme or to Weymouth, where Mr Vanneck the day before talked of going.

By Tuesday, Henrietta does believe the worst, and she has hysterics. Elizabeth has from the outset been neither optimistic nor consoled by faith. Her last words to her favourite brother were petulant; now that momentary irritation will remain with her forever. Once again her health collapses under the shock. ‘Scarcely conscious, her mind wanders.’ She comes even closer to dying than she did at the news of Sam’s death. Love and grief lodge in the body, making the immune system, the hormones, buckle and rev. As Papa says, ‘It is a wonder to me that she lives, for her love for [Bro] was truely great, & […] uninterrupted, it began in infancy & has gone on growing with their growth—He was always the adytum of all her secrets & plans.’

The family are left hanging for three weeks until at last, on 4 August, Bro’s body is washed up at nearby Babbacombe, along with the remains of Captain Clarke and of the sailor. Cruelly decomposed, all three are hastily buried just two days later in the local parish churchyard. The whole thing is both horrifying and uncanny. Until they had Bro’s body, the family couldn’t be absolutely certain he was dead, whatever common sense told them. But even once it is returned to them by the water they don’t in a sense have it, because it’s too destroyed to be viewed. And in the coming months Elizabeth must live on constantly in earshot of the sea that killed her brother. Now the breakers outside her window sound less like breathing than fighting for breath. In October she tells Miss Mitford, ‘These walls—& the sound of what is very fearful a few yards from them—that perpetual dashing sound, have preyed on me. I have been crushed trodden down.’

Not till December does her father feel that she’s well enough for him to leave her and resume his London responsibilities: the meetings with bankers, lawyers, middlemen and dealers that make up a life of international trade. Yet what she herself wants is for everyone just to go away and leave her alone: ‘She cannot hear of any one coming near her, indeed she would have us all to leave her, as she associates in her mind every one & every thing with her loss.’ As continuing ill-health, intensified now by grief, forces her to overwinter once more in ‘this dreadful place’, ‘Months roll over months. I know it is for good—but very hard to bear.’

Incredibly, in the